


A Family of Trees Wanting To Be Haunted

by Duck_Life



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Father-Daughter Relationship, Force Ghosts, Gen, Post-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 22:14:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5643778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia speaks with her father frequently. She usually doesn't want to hear what he has to say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Family of Trees Wanting To Be Haunted

It happens the first time when Leia’s holding her new baby, watching him stretch out his tiny arms and clench his tiny fists. It happens once Han and Luke have stepped out of the room, the very first time she’s alone with her son.

“Hello,” the man says, appearing suddenly in the corner.

Leia tucks little Ben closer to her body, splutters. “Get out! Who are you? _Get out_.”

He’s got long hair and Jedi robes, a scar over one eye. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” The stranger sounds kind, and somewhat familiar, but he is in fact a stranger.

“Well, you did,” Leia says bluntly, keeping her tight grip on her son. “Get out.”

“I just wanted to see my grandson.”

Leia coughs. “You? Your? See? M- _what_.”

“Sorry.”

“ _Sorry_?”

“N- no, I don’t mean…” Now he’s spluttering. “I didn’t… mean to apologize.”

“What, you think you don’t need to apologize?” Her hair is matted with sweat, her face a mess, she hasn’t slept in forty-eight hours, and still somehow she manages to sound intimidating and regal. “That’s very interesting. That’s a very, very interesting position you have. I’m extremely interested in how you feel you’re free of fault.”

“I didn’t…” he says, trying to recover. “Of course I feel I need to apologize. I _do_ apologize.”

“Well, that’s very big of you,” she tells him, acid in her voice. “I’m sure the people of Alderaan would thank you. You know. If they could.”

“I’m going away.”

“Good.” Luke’s told her that he talks to their father sometimes. She’s never had the inclination, and now that she’s had the opportunity she’s even surer of her opinion. “ _Goodbye_.”

“I just…” Anakin hesitates. “What did you name him?”

When she tells him, she hurls it like a grenade, and it hits its mark. “Ben.”

The thing is, Leia doesn’t stick to her stance. She knows how to justify her talks with her father to herself, knows how to convince herself she’s doing it for all the right reasons. After all, he was a general in the Clone Wars, and she can benefit from his experience. And it’s good for her, she thinks, to learn more about herself and where she comes from.

The truth is she’s lonely.

Luke’s off trying to jumpstart a new Jedi order and Han’s always running off with Chewbacca on some job. All her friends, what few she’s managed to cling to, are off starting new lives on distant planets and here she is, fighting the same old war, having frequent conversations with her deceased Sith lord father.

Anakin’s there for Ben’s first steps. It answers the question for Leia as to whether or not Ben can see him when the boy wobbles blissfully ignorant through his grandfather’s ghost.

“He’s on the move,” Anakin says, a smile splitting his face as he watches his grandson. Leia winces and finds herself wishing she couldn’t see his face again. It made it all that much easier to hate him.

“Why do you keep coming around?” she asks him one day, and he shrugs. It’s late at night, and she’s outside having a drink, concrete cold under her bare feet.

“I wanted a chance to talk to you,” he tells her.

She scoffs. “I remember plenty of talks we had when you were alive.”

And Anakin, Anakin stares through her, as if she’s the translucent one. “That wasn’t me.”

She sips, the wine tasting bitter. It’s so dark now, cloudy enough that the stars aren’t visible. Her father’s ghost is the only light she can see by. Ironic, she thinks.

“You don’t get to pick and choose,” she says evenly, “when you’re yourself and when you’re someone else. You’re always the same person.”

When she turns to look at him, he’s vanished again.

One day she’s handing out orders to the Resistance, dictating the process of their mission. It shouldn’t be too dangerous, it shouldn’t be too risky, but still she explains everything in explicit detail, pushes extreme caution. Her people are trained well and incredibly adept, but they got that way for a reason.

She’s in charge of keeping them that way.

As the group files out of the room, she catches her father watching her. Always careful not to let her eyes stray to him when others can see, always cautious, she waits for the room to drain before turning to him.

“What?”

“What?”

“You were looking at me,” she says, shoulders back. Their dynamic shifts each time he speaks with her, and she makes it clear that while he may be able to disappear like a wisp of smoke, she damn well isn’t going to let him go without an argument.

“It’s nothing,” Anakin tells her, looking at his daughter, the General. “Just… you remind me of your mother.”

She peppers him with questions about her mother. The image she’s always had, the one she shared with Luke— beautiful but sad— gets cleared up for her by her father.

“She was always beautiful,” he assures her. “But she was only sad near the end there. Because of me.” And Leia, Leia wants to throw this in his face, like she’s a child. She wants to be angry with him, that she has only a vague feeling associated with her mother, that the feeling is sadness, that it’s his fault.

It’s just that he looks so wistful. What she sees in his face feels sadder than her whole life of longing to know more about her birthmother. It startles her, and she has to ask him to go again.

When he comes back, he tells her better things about Padmé Amidala, lighter things. That she was a kind queen and a ruthless senator, that neither contradicted the other. That she was fiercely loyal to her morals and to her loved ones, that she loved flowers but was allergic to some and would stubbornly keep them around in vases anyway until her eyes ran and she could hardly speak for sneezing. That she was strong, and smart, and seemed somehow infinite.

That she would have been proud of Leia.

When Ben becomes Kylo Ren, Anakin isn’t there. He isn’t there in the rain, to see his grandson walk away from everything Leia has fought to give him.

He’s there after.

“You could have stopped him,” Leia throws at her father later that night, later that awful night. She’s alone in her quarters except for the Force ghost and she should be furious but her son has sapped it all from her. All she has left for her father is watered down regret. “He believes in you. Hell, he _worships_ you.”

“He doesn’t worship _me_.”

“Oh, who cares?” she says, and Anakin can see the years stacking onto her. “Fine. Fine. He worships _Darth Vader_. He wants to be like _Darth Vader_. But I am telling you that _you could have stopped him_.”

“I know.”

He always looks like he’s twenty-four. Leia never knows quite why, but he always looks like he’s twenty-four.

It’s only now that he sounds like it, too.

“I know I could have stopped him,” Anakin says. “I _could have_ , I _should have been able to_. I just… I just don’t know why I couldn’t. He can’t hear me. Or, or he doesn’t listen. I could have stopped him. I should have been able to stop him.”

Leia looks at her father and thinks about circles, about how everything in the universe just links back up together at the beginning. How the Empire rises and falls and then it’s the First Order and after that falls another will take its place. How she is so, so tired of it all.

Anakin looks at her and wishes, not for the first time, that he could hold his only daughter.

His ghost doesn’t come around much after that. Leia thinks he’s with Kylo Ren, trying to reach him, trying to convince him that he’s wrong, but she’s not sure. Maybe he’s given up.

Maybe he’s right to do so.

Luke is gone. Han is gone. Ben is gone. Anakin is gone. Leia keeps thinking about circles. And cycles. She was alone, she is alone, she will be alone.

And then suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, Han Solo is back in her life and he is bolder than ever, he is rough hands and a sideways smile and he is _Han_.

And she tells him, “ _If you see our son, bring him home_ ,” and when she breaks away from him she can see her father watching the two of them, and maybe it was right then that she should have known it would be the last thing she ever said to Han.

After the battle, after the base explodes, after it all, Anakin appears in her war room. She’s the only one there. She goes there alone to think. She goes there alone to not think, to not think about anything, to not think about all of it.

“I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t know if it’s a _This was my fault_ “I’m sorry” or an _I’m sorry for your loss_ “I’m sorry.” She doesn’t want to ask. Knowing Anakin believes it’s his fault will only make it harder for her to blame herself, and right now blaming herself is the only thing keeping her from completely giving out on the floor.

“I just…” she says, and holds a hand fast over her mouth because he doesn’t get to see her cry. When she was six years old and she broke her arm falling off a bantha, then he could have seen her cry. When she was thirteen and her best friend’s family was murdered by Stormtroopers, then he could have seen her cry.

But Anakin Skywalker gave that up, so he doesn’t get it back now.

“I want to see Han,” she says. “You’re dead. He’s dead. Show me Han. I want to see Han.” She is calm, she is okay. She is the General and she is making her demands.

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“Well then how the hell does it work?” she says, lashing out finally. “Why do I get you for thirty years and I can’t even see him again even for one second? Do I not deserve that? I just… just _one goddamn second_.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and he’s _crying_ and she can’t believe it. _She’s_ not even crying. “Of course you deserve it. Leia,” he says to her, “you deserve so much.”

And no, she still won’t cry in front of her father, not even when he’s standing here weeping for her own dead husband like he even knew Han. “Where was this concern when I was watching Alderaan burn?” she asks.

“I was…” he says, generations of regrets pushing down on him. “I was gone.”

“You were _right there_ ,” she says, and here she is lashing out again because he was _right there_. “You have always been _right there_. All of this surrounds _you_.” Of course she remembers Alderaan was all Tarkin, but he was _there._ He has told her that her mother died of her own will and not because of him but he was _there_ letting her choke on her words. Ben made his own choices but her father was still _there_ at the core of them. “It has always been _you_ , you have always been _right there_ in the center of it and this is _all_ your _fault_.”

She’s not thinking, she grabs the nearest heavy object her hands can find and hurls it at him. The helmet crashes into the opposite wall and drops to the floor. And she cries, oh, she cries like she hasn’t in years. In decades.

But she keeps her promise to herself. Before she lets a single tear fall, her father has gone away again.

 

 

 


End file.
